Word limits are everywhere: a 250-word college application answer, a 1,500-word blog brief, a 300-word abstract, a five-minute wedding toast. Writing too little looks thin and writing too much can get a submission rejected or a speech cut short. Pasting into a full word processor just to see a number is a detour.
Start typing or paste a draft below. The word count, characters, sentences and paragraphs update live, along with an estimate of how long the text takes to read silently and to say out loud. A Top keywords panel lists the ten words you use most, ignoring filler like "the" and "and". The analysis runs in your browser, so unpublished work stays private.
How words are counted
Counting words sounds trivial until you meet edge cases. This counter follows the Unicode word-boundary rules built into modern browsers, the same rules used for double-click selection. A contraction such as "don't" is one word, a number such as 3.14 or 1,000 is one word, and punctuation is never counted. Hyphenated compounds are split at the hyphen, so "state-of-the-art" counts as four words; Microsoft Word would count it as one, which is the most common reason the two totals differ slightly.
Because the rules are Unicode-aware, the counter also works for languages that do not separate words with spaces in the same way English does. Arabic text is counted word by word, and Chinese or Japanese text is split into dictionary words by the browser rather than counted as one huge block.
Who uses a word counter
Students with essay and application limits
Admissions essays, scholarship answers and coursework often set a strict maximum. Paste the final draft, check the Words total, and trim until you are safely under the limit, keeping in mind that your school's own tool may count hyphenated words differently.
Writers and SEO editors
Content briefs specify a target length, and the Top keywords panel shows whether the main topic actually appears often enough, or whether one word is repeated so much that the text reads awkwardly.
Speakers preparing a talk
Speaking time, based on 150 words per minute, tells you whether a toast, presentation or video script fits its slot. A three-minute slot holds roughly 450 words at that pace.
Translators and freelancers billing per word
Many translation and writing jobs are quoted per word. A quick count of the source text helps you price a job before opening any special software.
Reading time, speaking time and keyword density
Reading time divides the word count by 238 words per minute, an average silent reading speed for adult readers of English non-fiction reported in a large 2019 review of reading research. Speaking time uses 150 words per minute, a comfortable pace for presentations and voice-overs. Both are rounded to whole seconds, and real speeds vary with the reader and the difficulty of the text.
Sentences are detected with the browser's sentence rules, which end a sentence at full stops, question marks and exclamation marks. Paragraphs are blocks separated by at least one empty line, so a single line break inside a block does not start a new paragraph.
Top keywords counts each word regardless of capitals, skips common English and Arabic function words, single letters and plain numbers, then shows the ten most frequent with how many times each appears and its share of all words. That share is often called keyword density.
طريقة الاستخدام
- Type in the Your text box or paste your draft into it.
- Read Words, Characters, Sentences and Paragraphs in the counters under the box.
- Check Reading time and Speaking time if the text will be read online or spoken aloud.
- Look at Top keywords to see which terms dominate, then edit and watch every number update.
Limitations
- Hyphenated words and slash-joined words count as separate words, which can make totals a little higher than Microsoft Word or Google Docs.
- Abbreviations with full stops, such as "Dr." or "e.g.", can be read as the end of a sentence and raise the sentence count.
- The keyword list ignores stop words in English and Arabic only; in other languages common words like articles will appear in it.
- Reading and speaking times are estimates based on fixed average speeds, not on the complexity of your text.